A little more on this fantastic documentary, which you only have two more nights (tonight and tomorrow night) to see.

The story of gang violence in Los Angeles, and around the country, is usually told as a law enforcement problem. Sometimes it's also told as a contemporary social problem, with a discussion of the role that poverty and drug policy and the penal system play. But I've never seen the problem so thoroughly excavated as it is in Made in America, which first sets the Los Angeles gang problem in its historic context, looking at what brought African-Americans to the city in the first place (World War II and the auto-makers, among other things); what confined them to areas like Compton and Watts (racist housing covenants, racists police practices, white fear); and what helped create a leadership vacuum in the community that was filled, in part, by gangs (the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, for starters).

The fighting between the Crips and the Bloods constitutes, in the words of one of the characters in this documentary, "one of the longest-running wars in the history of this country." And here it is, in all its depressing glory: older men who wistfully remember when L.A.'s gang members used only fists and would politely but firmly make you an appointment for your required ass-beating; mothers who are helpless to stop their sons from joining up and getting gunned down (and, worse, other mothers whose drug addictions and gang affiliations leave their children with a profoundly warped social conscience); professors and community activists who can tell you exactly what created the problem, and how it might be solved, but who can't get anyone to pay serious attention; and through it all, Forest Whitaker calmly narrating the damning facts of this case of profoundly American neglect.

To repeat: If you don't know what you're doing tonight, now you do.